Quote: (09-13-2014 07:08 AM)frenchie Wrote:
Who / Whom
Even smart people gave up on that one.
Relevant and interesting article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/...re-english
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What Messrs Lupyan and Dale found through a statistical look at thousands of languages, John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, found in a detailed study of just five. In his 2007 book “Language Interrupted”, he asked why certain big, prestigious languages seem systematically simpler than their ancestors and cousins. English is simpler than German (and Old English); modern Persian is a breeze next to Old Persian and modern Pushtu; modern spoken Arabic dialects have lost much of the grammatical curlicues of classical Arabic; modern Mandarin is simpler than other modern Chinese languages; and Malay is simpler than related Austronesian languages. Mr McWhorter’s conclusion, in simple terms, is that when lots of adults learn a foreign language imperfectly, they do without unnecessary and tricky bits of grammar. (Most languages have enough built-in redundancy for grammars to be more complicated than they have to be.) Modern Mandarin is a perfect example of a language almost completely devoid of inflectional morphology, all those prefixes and suffixes. All languages have their complexities, but Mr McWhorter believes that Mandarin, English, Persian, Malay and Arabic dialects are all clearly simpler than they used to be.
What, then, can we predict English will lose if the process goes on? An easy choice seems to be “whom”. English was once heavily inflected; all nouns carried a suffix showing whether they were subjects, direct objects, indirect objects or played some other role in a sentence. Today, only the pronouns are inflected. And while any competent speaker can use I, me, my and mine correctly, even the most fluent can find whom (the object form of who) slippery. So whom might disappear completely, or perhaps only survive as a stylistic option in formal writing.
Another gilded-lily complication of English that foreign learners struggle with is the tense-aspect system, including three present-tense forms, I live, I am living and I do live, plus compound forms like I will have been living. These are tricky for speakers who don’t have them in their native languages. While these different tenses and aspects focus on different things, the differences are often not crucial. In the very long run, as English is spoken by more people who have learned it as a foreigner, some simplification of this system would not be surprising.